Coronavirus

Until March 17, Toyota’s plant in Onnaing, France, was turning out about 1,000 cars/day with 4,500 employees. Management closed it then on orders of the French government due to COVID-19. They are now restarting it, with an initial goal of making 50 cars/day. The changes they have made are highlighted in the following video but the narration is in French. Even if you can’t follow it, please look at the pictures, and check out the explanations below.

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David Simchi-Levi has been a contributor to supply chain management for more than 20 years and I have two of the books he co-authored on my shelf, Designing and Managing the Supply Chain, a textbook for business and industrial engineering students, and The Logic of Logistics, for readers who care about the math behind the formulas and algorithms. So, when he announced a webinar on supply chain recovery after a pandemic, I signed up to listen. The full webinar is now available on Youtube, including a couple of minutes of dead silence in the middle while he was reading audience questions. The slide set is also available in PDF, and it includes an appendix with descriptions of algorithms not discussed in the webinar.

Michel Baudin‘s comments: As the COVID-19 pandemic is a currently unfolding catastrophe, the webinar devotes a large opening section to admiring the problem. This section is as of April 8, 2020. If the webinar were held, say, in August, 2020, this section would require an update. Simchi-Levi then goes on to describe a Risk Exposure Model that he and his team co-developed with Ford in the early 2010s based on the experience of supply chain recovery after the Fukushima earthquake or the Thailand floods of 2011. It is less connected to the latest news than the introduction.

These events disrupted, in particular, the supply of black paint to Ford, so that its customers could buy a car in any color as long as it was not black. They were major disasters at the time but, in retrospect, look small when compared with COVID-19. Simchi-Levi then uses the Risk Exposure Model as the basis for a series of recommendations to manufacturers.

“While the spread of Covid-19 was effectively suppressed for two short periods, each time it rebounded. Another aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic is illustrated by this graph—declines in new cases of Covid-19 lag behind the interventions. Accordingly, these data cannot be used to establish cause-and-effect relationships.

In addition, deaths from Covid-19 lag even further behind. On March 27 there had been a cumulative total of 9 deaths from Covid-19 cases in all of Westchester County. Three days later this total had climbed to 19 deaths. The next day, March 31, there had been a total of 25 deaths from this outbreak. All of this suggests that while non-pharmaceutical interventions can be used to mitigate, or even suppress, the Covid-19 pandemic, these interventions have to be maintained until pharmaceutical interventions become available.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments: An informative, well-researched piece on the current tragedy. It’s not about manufacturing but it’s about the context in which we’ll have to practice it for the next two years.